Ways to Prevent Plagiarism in Your Class – Part 2

Ways to Prevent Plagiarism in Your Class – Part 2

It is very important to tell your students that what is more important than having good grades is to acquire the skills to show those grades.

It is very crucial for them to have researching and writing skills because these make them very visible to the one assessing their abilities. Students can be encouraged to improve their own capacities if you stress to them that improvement is an essential part of the grading. One of the reasons why students are inclined to plagiarize is because of the reason that others are doing the same thing. They think that it is a good excuse for plagiarizing just so they could keep up with their peers. They are confronted by the dilemma whether to spend a lot of time working hard, be faced with a possibility of having an average grade, and have lesser time for other subjects, or having high grades by just copying from some source, and being left with a lot of free time in their hands. The best way to handle the matter is to catch the students who plagiarize. By doing this, those who do not want to be behind their fellows and want to work fairly will have lesser weight of their shoulders. The thing is, students do not always have the idea of the amount of time that they should spend completing their assignments.

It is either they do not realize that there are a lot of work involved in making their research paper, or maybe they think that the work is just too overwhelming that they procrastinate and start working when the deadline is near. When they put off doing their assignments, there is not much time to make their own original work. A very effective way to take care of this situation is to have a schedule for each progress on their papers. Specific dates before the final draft is submitted, should be given for each portion of the assignment so that they will be aware of the extent of the work. This way, it makes the task less daunting for students, and they can have a proper schedule to work on the assignment. Sometimes, writers plagiarize the work of others without them realizing that they are doing it. This happens when they do not know the different types of plagiarism and when the sources are not cited properly. Being unaware of the proper citation forms is the most common cause of unintended plagiarism. Students are often confused whether they are plagiarizing or paraphrasing.

It would be very constructive if you are going to pass around passages that are paraphrased and plagiarized and explain to your students the differences. Emphasize that important points of the original must be kept, but in order for those points to fit in subject of their argument, the style and the structure of the grammar must be notably altered. Since the mixing up of the ideas of the students and their sources creates confusion when they start to write their papers, teaching them techniques in note-taking is very beneficial. An example is the use of colored pens and “post-it tabs” to serve as marks for the pages. This method will save them more time, and everything would be clear regarding the references.